Hailey Bieber recently revealed her story about suffering a blood clot and having heart surgery.
On March 10, Hailey Bieber was hospitalized after facing stroke-like symptoms connected to a blood clot in her brain. She disclosed new details about the “scariest moment of [her] life,” including the heart surgery she underwent, in a new video posted on her YouTube channel yesterday.
“I was sitting at breakfast with my husband having a normal day, a normal conversation,” she recalled of the day she was hospitalized. “We were in the middle of talking, and all of a sudden, I felt this really weird sensation that traveled down my arm from my shoulder all the way down to my fingertips, and it made my finger tips feel really numb and weird. …Justin was like, ‘Are you okay?’ And I just didn’t respond because I wasn’t sure, and then he asked me again. When I went to respond, I couldn’t speak. The right side of my face started drooping. …I thought I was having a stroke.”
Bieber was rushed to the hospital by an ambulance, but by the time they got to the emergency room, she was no longer experiencing symptoms. After many scans, doctors discovered that she had suffered a blood clot in her brain. They suggested that her blood clot was potentially caused due to her use of birth control pills, her recent COVID-19 recovery, and the fact that she was recently on a flight for a long period of time and didn’t get up to move.
The following day, the model was discharged, but sought other opinions from doctors at UCLA. The UCLA doctors found she had a patent foramen ovale (PFO), a small flap-like opening in the heart that forms when a hole in the heart does not close after birth. The UCLA team decided that Bieber’s blood clot, rather that being absorbed in her lungs, had traveled to her heart and escaped through the PFO to her brain.
The doctors recommended that she undergo a PFO closure procedure, which inserts a catheter into the patient and, through the vein that connects to the heart, inserts a button-like device to the flap.
“It went very smoothly. I’m recovering really well, really fast,” Bieber said. “The biggest thing I feel, honestly, is I just feel really relieved that we were able to figure everything out, that we were able to get it closed, that I will be able to just move on from this really scary situation and just live my life.”
